Like every Democratic presidential candidate, Howard Dean has said he’ll support the eventual party nominee, even if it isn’t him. The problem is Dean keeps saying things that lead me to believe he doesn’t really mean it.
Campaigning in Iowa yesterday, Dean said his base of supporters may simply sit out the 2004 election and let Bush have another term unless Democrats make him the nominee. In fact, Dean seems more than willing to let that happen.
“If I don’t win the nomination, where do you think those million and a half people, half a million on the Internet, where do you think they’re going to go?” Dean said during a meeting with reporters. “I don’t know where they’re going to go. They’re certainly not going to vote for a conventional Washington politician.”
In the same interview, Dean said if one of his rivals ultimately wins the nomination, he’ll endorse him or her, but it may not matter.
“That’s not transferable. That’s why endorsements are great but they don’t guarantee anything,” Dean said.
This is Howard Dean at his least attractive and most divisive. He claims to be interested in building a stronger party, but he fails to mention that his interests are limited to helping him and him alone.
Unfortunately, it’s part of an ongoing pattern for Dean. Yesterday’s comments were not just an off-hand remark that Dean hadn’t thought through. He’s been making similar comments for months.
In September, for example, Dean did an interview with LA Weekly in which Dean admitted that his campaign is more about promoting himself than beating Bush.
“I want to get this nomination, and if I don’t…these kids are not transferable,” Dean said in language that mirrors yesterday’s comments. “I can’t just go out and say, ‘Okay, so I didn’t win the nomination, so go ahead and vote for the Democrats.’ They’re not going to suddenly just go away. That’s not gonna happen.”
It’s disappointing, to say the least, to hear Dean effectively threaten the party that he’ll take his ball and go home unless everyone makes him happy. It reinforces the concerns raised by Ev Ehrlich, for example, who wrote in the Post recently that Dean is “essentially a third-party candidate using modern technology to achieve a takeover of the Democratic Party.”
The truth is, I can’t think of the last serious presidential candidate from either party admit so openly that he’d put his own ego above the needs of the party and the country. There have been plenty of hard-fought primaries over the years, even among bitter rivals, but candidates have always closed ranks and rallied behind one another for the general election.
Dean, on the other hand, seems to have already made up his mind to screw the party unless things go as he wants them to. It makes him come across as a spoiled brat who never learned to share.
Yes, Dean has said he’ll support the nominee, and that’s great. But he’s also said he’s unwilling to mobilize his base of supporters to back the Dem nominee unless it’s his name at the top of the ticket. All of this before a single vote has been cast by a single Democrat.
Dean says his legions are not “transferable.” That’s nonsense. Those of us who believe America needs a new president in 2005 have to be willing to support the candidate seeking to replace him, whomever that may be. Instead of effectively encouraging his supporters to stay at home on Election Day, Dean should be promising to do everything in his power to rally as many people as possible to support the Dem candidate and beat Bush in November. That’s what the Democratic Party wing of the Democratic Party would do. Dean, on the other hand, seems willing only to represent the Howard Dean wing of the Democratic Party.
One really gets the impression that Dean’s success thus far has gone to his head. A year ago he was a scrappy underdog who wanted to rally the party to beat a president he viewed as a disaster. Now he’s the frontrunner who doesn’t like questions, rejects criticisms, and expects — indeed, demands — that everyone will get in line. It’s not a campaign; it’s a cult of personality.
Ironically, last week in New Hampshire, Dean said, “We’re not going to win as Democrats unless we’re all together, and that’s the truth.”
Together, that is, behind him.